Mars mission would take search for life to next level

Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 14, 2006 at midnight

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BOULDER - In four years, a new Mini-Cooper-sized Mars rover could be crushing, brushing, coring, sampling, scooping and analyzing the surface and atmosphere of the planet, getting the best read yet on whether life may exist there.

If NASA gives the go-ahead, the $1.6 billion Mars Science Laboratory would blast off in September 2009 and reach the Martian surface about 10 months later, scientists gathered at the University of Colorado for the National Research Council's 2006 meeting of the Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life were told Wednesday.

In a nutshell, the mission would be a "search for carbon," Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told the group. Carbon, as far as Earth's scientists know, is indispensable to life.

The one-ton MSL rover would be more than 6 feet long, have six wheels and a 6-foot mast, and be able to rumble several miles to find the most promising rocks and soil for study.

The 10 instruments on board, including one built in Boulder, would work together to determine which samples are worth looking at, and which of those are worth scooping, coring or analyzing for the presence of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

Other instruments would analyze Mars' 4 billion-year atmospheric evolution and the role of water in the planet's history.

"We'll be inferring - taking what we know about what it takes to support life here and applying it to what we find on Mars," Vasavada said.

The mission is contingent upon NASA's budget, but for now it's something the powers that be want to see happen, the scientists were told.

During the rover's two years on Mars, it would collect about 70 samples - the cream of the crop - for a return trip to Earth.

But information about the planet will be beamed back to scientists throughout the mission.

According to plans, the rover's instrumentation would include:

• A coring instrument that will drill into rocks and withdraw pencil-width cores.

• A camera that will capture high-definition video of the surface.

• A chemical camera that will fire a laser at a rock, causing a cloud of dust that can be analyzed for its chemical fingerprint.

• Another instrument that will analyze rocks for evidence of frost and ice.

• A space-age divining rod from Russia that will pulse the ground with neutrons to measure the abundance of water or, if not water, the presence of hydrating minerals that indicate that water was once there.

• A radiation assessment detector from Boulder's Southwest Research Institute for Space Studies that will measure solar and galactic radiation, as well as radiation from the Martian surface. Solar radiation is another important catalyst for life, although too much is harmful.

The tentative launch date is still three years away, and the technical challenges remain enormous, said some of the scientists. That includes the enormity of the payload - about 200 pounds of instruments - which is unprecedented.

But, Vasavada said, "There's no single part of MSL that is more risky or scary or complex than what we've done before."

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